GarthBox

Authors and artists traverse this admirably.

They take up residence in a new city or new school or new nonprofit program.

They combine teaching and creating into one. At the same time they’re making observations about a new space, a new audience, a new cohort of students interested in the same craft as them. They’re growing.

A temporary residence doesn’t need to be exclusive to authors and artists though.

In the ever-digital and accessibly-remote world, it’s becoming easier than ever to take up residency somewhere else.

There’s a ceiling to the bubbles we’re all in. While growth can and does happen inside them, remarkability is rooted in those who take up multiple temporary residences.

Stay Positive & Don’t Wait For The Pop

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There’s no more wonderful experience around not knowing than looking up and seeing a plane in the sky.

You’re never filled with dread about it. You’re always curious about where it’s going. You wonder who is on it. There’s a little jolt of excitement at the thought of you being in it and heading to a dream destination. Maybe you’re just impressed with how it’s scraping the sky. Either way, you’re living in complete unknown when you see the plane and you feel joy.

Interestingly, the only thing stopping us from looking at other parts of our life like the plane is ourselves.

Not knowing isn’t a weakness. It lets us to open to new ideas, different opinions and new connections. Not knowing opens the world up for us.

Something to remember next time you feel like you don’t know enough.

Stay Positive & It Actually Puts You At The Advantage

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When you ship difficult work and ship it well, there will be a demand for more or better work and it gets more difficult.

When you’re trying to strategize for the year ahead, there’s only one guarantee: it will be a crazier year than this last one.

But once you acknowledge it, it becomes easier to work within the crazy, ship better work faster and pivot more seamlessly.

It all begins with right-sizing the expectations.

Stay Positive & Don’t Wait For The Anticipation To Build

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Do you put more in to get the job than you put in once you have it?

Do you work harder on a big bang launch of a product than growing it once it’s out there?

Do you try harder to grow your relationship after a milestone than planning for that milestone?

It’s not a matter of picking only one side of the scale, but it is a important to pick a side to be the most important.

Stay Positive & Then Gut Check Your Efforts Scales On The Side That Matters More

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There is really no better creative exercise one can enroll in than that of writing words through the lens of another.

Write the perfect testimonial you want someone to leave your business.

Write the narrative you want your interviewee to say.

Write the feedback letter from the bank you’re pitching your idea to for a business loan.

Write the love letter you’d want to get from someone special in your life.

Write your work review you hope your future boss would write about you.

There’s so much power behind this. Empathy. Accountability. Vision and imagination. Goals. Drive. And a hundred other buzzwords of productivity and meaning.

But it starts with being vulnerable and actually writing it.

Stay Positive & Your Notebook Is Waiting

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The hard side of a network is the side worth putting your effort into growing. (Think, drivers, not riders for Uber.) Without doing so, you won’t scale the network or product.

The hard project at work is worth working on more than the easy stuff. The hard project is what gets you noticed, and by extension, likely more compensated, more appreciated and will leave you feeling more fulfilled.

The hard part of a relationship is being more generous than what you get out of it.

The hard stuff is the stuff worth doing if you want any noticeable or meaningful impact.

If all that matters is momentary satisfaction of a small box that gets checked, by all means, continue with the easy stuff.

Stay Positive & More Feeling Of Risk, More Actual Reward

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It’s pretty easy for someone else to pick you.

The employer sees your resume and they pick it from the pile for an interview. A magazine Google’s a topic and finds your blog and sees you’re passionate about their topic so they pick you to guest a column.

The thing about getting picked is that it starts with picking yourself.

Picking yourself as a qualified candidate that applies to the job. Picking yourself to start a blog and not wait for a columnist position to open up.

You can imagine what it takes to get picked then.

You can also imagine that maybe you don’t need to get picked at all if you do it for yourself enough.

Stay Positive & Pick Early, Pick Often

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